Epic?
Silk, abruptly leaving an impossibly important engagement, a highly important diplomatic meeting, as host, runs out into the city to meet his love, who'll prove to have been just as much.... almost just as much of the same mind to have met up with him, as soon as his whereabouts were known. And this happy engagement, between a man who risked imperilling a just-forged alliance between cities to meet his love, and a woman concerned to keep her tits in place (which otherwise would be dragging on the ground) and a speaking animal in all ways mentally comparable to a human child on an altar of sacrifice, follows:
“She wiped her eyes. "Now I'm coming back. Catch me." She rolled over the back of the front seat so that Silk had to, and lying in his arms kissed him again. With no need of speech, her kiss said, Beat me, shame and starve me. Do as you want with me, but don't leave me. I'll never do those things, he thought, and tried to make his own kiss tell her so.”
[...]
“Hyacinth grinned like a twelve-year-old.”
[...]
“She laid her hand on his. "You stay in here or we'll get all naked and sweaty, and we ought to do that someplace nicer. Where's the driver?”
[...]
“No, you don't. I did. I knew exactly where you were. At the Juzgado or the calde's Palace. Everybody I asked wanted to talk about you, and everybody said one place or the other. But I looked, well, like every other slut in the Orilla, only worse, and I stank [...]
"And clean clothes, clean underwear and a bunch of other things. You know what I'd look like without all this stuff?"
"Yes," Silk declared. "Like Kypris herself."
"Thanks. Like a boy, only with tits down to my waist. You saw me naked."
Silk felt his face flush. "They weren't. Not nearly."
"That's the trouble with big ones," Hyacinth explained to Xiphias.
"The bigger they are the lower they go, unless you've got something to hold them up. Will that make it hard for me to sword-fight.
”“Will if they bounce, lass! But there's ways! ”
[brief pause, as driver rejoins them with escaped catachrest]
“He led us quite a chase, Hy," Hossaan said, "but we got him in the alley trying to wriggle through a hole."
"You're bleeding!"
"He put up a fight. If somebody else will hold him, I'll get out the aid kit."
"Add, add word!" the little orange-and-white catachrest reiterated.
"Pack! Itty laddie, peas dun lit am kilt may!" [Translation: "Little lady, please don't let 'em kill me!"]
"She won't, for an hour or two at least," Silk told him. "Willet, I want you to take us out to Blood's and help us collect Hyacinth's belongings." For a moment, Silk paused to gaze upon Hyacinth.
"Then to the Prolocutor's Palace.”
(Excerpt from Epiphany of the Long Sun)
Note: I have no interest in copying in bits the entire book, but to partake in conversation with my last post, as I read through the Long Sun and Short Sun again. Humour and bathos of enlightenment, is meant for all.
Like
Show more reactions
CommentShare
Comments
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Note, I actually like Hy here; frank and honest (and so maybe not herself so juvenile here). It's more Silk that is embarrassing... "like Kypris herself."
Manage
Like
Show more reactions
António Pedro Marques It's not embarrassing, it's how he felt.
Manage
Like
Show more reactions
Patrick McEvoy-Halston António Pedro Marques Maybe more "embarrassing" than truly embarrassing... because you're right. Still, there is here in Hyacinth's mood of frank honesty... essential groundedness, some available play on Silk's own ability to be more forthright with himself, which he could potentially seize and make use of. The question has always been how on earth have you made a goddess of me?... what is unfair, to me, Hyacinth, that you persist in doing so... so you can never be sure he's truly in love with what he sees, or only what he is CHOOSING to see ( in my judgment, abandoned, awkward Hyacinth is to him his own "boy" self, whom he intends to shower with attention in a way his highly depressed mother could not avail him, for being so absorbed in her own pains and sorrows [litany of the long sun, 21]). Psychologically, Silk behaves as if he is projecting someone onto her, not mature loving her in sickness and in health, as the saying goes. I agree this is disputable, but that's how it mostly plays with me.
Manage
Like
Show more reactions
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Also, for me, there's some sense of duplicity at work here. Silk gets love... feels like he's being loved, for being so pitiful in feeling so much love for someone others would find base, would dismiss as unworthy of true love and marriage. (A comparable instance of this occurs in Wolfe's the Knight, when Able writes of how he arrives at the surface of the volcano, burned, tired... wrecked, and ostensibly rejoiced in his seeing stars more beautiful than anyone has ever seen them. He is not actually pleased only at this great site, but owing to his being subconsciously aware that being so baldly pitiful means that a pitying overlooker -- a habitually otherwise absent parental god -- would surely be loving him now. [Call me Dr. Crane... I'll accept.]) It relates to the text's portrayal of how gods love you most, not only when you sacrifice 100 children to them, but to your being pitiful. Then, love is your due. There is a lot of self-attendance, wound-licking, self-concern, in Silk's ostensibly generous display of love for another here. Love, true respect, true kindness... would come in his realizing his use of another person here, and letting her be free to meet someone who loves her AND always fully sees her. Silk does not.
Manage
Comments
Post a Comment